The Last Town On Earth by Thomas Mullen

The novel, The Last Town on Earth, written by Thomas Mullen, is centered on the events that occur in the fictional town of Commonwealth in Washington, as World War I was coming to an end, after many years. Despite the fact that the town of Commonwealth was usually very peaceful, albeit one that was very withdrawn from the rest of the world, rumors of a deadly disease, the Spanish Influenza reached the small town. The Spanish Influenza at this point, had overtaken many other parts of the world. This news began to cause widespread panic and fear. The town voted to quarantine itself, not allowing anyone or anything to go in or out of the Commonwealth in hopes of blocking off the disease from reaching their town. However, in the end, despite their precautions, the epidemic reached the Commonwealth and its people. The Last Town on Earth is broken down into four parts: ‘Commonwealth’, ‘Prisoners’, ‘Sacrifice’, and ‘Specters’.

The first part of the novel is very descriptive of the main characters, and how they lived their lives before word of the Spanish Influenza reached them. The town, almost unanimously, votes to blockade themselves from outside contact, not letting anything or anyone, in or out, until the epidemic came to an end. Despite fear that supplies and food may grow scarce during the waiting period, the town chooses to do this, overrun by fear of sickness. Armed guards, Philip and Graham, are stationed at the fences, and all is going well until someone attempts to enter the town. The man, who is a sickly and lost soldier, is shot to death. In the second part of the novel, one of the same guards, Philip, is faced with the same predicament. Still ridden with guilt from the last kill, he allows the second soldier in, telling him that he’d have to hide, and leave immediately after he received food. However, Philip and the soldier are caught, and imprisoned. The doctor of the town sets a forty-eight hour waiting period for the imprisonment, for fear of contagion. Philip is released, but the soldier, thought to be a German spy, continues his imprisonment. Despite these efforts, the flu reaches Commonwealth in the third part of the book. Angered by the stranger that he believes to have infected his town, Graham kills the soldier, only to realize that the contagion was brought in by their own people, who snuck in and out of the Commonwealth to visit a neighboring town. The town is riddled with the sickness. “Doctor Banes’s badly kept records showed that 250 people in Commonwealth – over half the town’s population – had contracted the flu. Of these, fifty-six men, women, and children had died,” (page 381). The mill, the center of the town, had to be closed down, as well as the general store, the only source of food for many of the inhabitants of Commonwealth. In the fourth, and final part of the novel, many of the sick are finally starting to get better, just as ‘civil servants’ march into their isolated town with the sole desire to arrest and imprison any men who had failed to enlist in the federal army. The people of the town, particularly Philip and Graham, manage to chase them off, only to learn that the war has come to an end, and with it, the infamous flu epidemic.

The novel offers many vivid descriptions of how the Spanish Influenza affected the bodies of the people who were inflicted by it. “The woman lay on her side, facing her husband, her lips frozen in a rectus of pain. Her thin blond hair spilled across the pillow, some falling over the side of the bed and some caked in the dried blood on her face. It was impossible to tell how long she had been dead, as the Spanish flu’s corpses looked unlike any the doctor had seen. The blueness that darkened her husband has fully consumed her, making it impossible to guess her age or even her race. She resembled the burn victims the doctor had seen after a horrific mill fire years ago…They hear more coughing, from another room. The doctor and nurse looked at each other, surprised, then followed the sound into a bedroom on the opposite side of the hall. Here the window was curtainless, and as soon as they entered they saw two bodies lying on a large bed, both of them coughing. They were young adults, the sheets bloody near their heads. They sounded exactly like what they were: two people slowly suffocating to death,” (page xiii). Descriptions of the disease go on as the novel does so, and continue in their graphic nature. “The first sign of danger was the speed of contagion. But the symptoms rivaled the breadth of the epidemic in their horror. Even if only a few people had suffered this disease, it still would have been a terror to be scarcely believed. Men bled from the nose, from the ears, some from their eyes. Autopsies of dead soldiers revealed that their lungs were blue and heavy, thick with fluid, sometimes thick with blood. Victims became cyanotic, starved of oxygen – parts or all of their bodies turned blue, sometimes such a dark hue that the corpses of white men were indistinguishable from those of the black men. They were literally drowning to death in their own fluids,” (page 129).

As Thomas Mullen explains in the Author’s Note, the scenarios that occur in this novel, though fictional, were not entirely unlike the reality of the time. “Although Commonwealth is a fictional creation, had it been real, it would not have been entirely unique in its progressive mission,” (page 389). He goes onto to speak of how The Great Influenza by John M. Barry reported that “Gunnison, Colorado, was one such town that emerged unscathed from the epidemic by completely isolating itself from neighboring towns in the San Juan Mountains. Some other towns’ similar attempts were not so successful,” (page 389). The Spanish Influenza epidemic was, and remains, one of the most deadly events the world has ever seen, the death toll hitting over one hundred million worldwide in only the first year – a number more than six times as great as the death toll from the actual war that was happening at the same time as the flu epidemic. There is no doubt in my mind that if anything like it were to happen again, there would be similar reactions to those in The Last Town on Earth. These events occurring for a second time would have a devastating effect on the world, as they did the first time around. As Thomas Mullen says in the author’s note, “The flu had an amazingly disabling effect on nearly all societies that suffered it, and it left its mark,” (391). The fear of sickness riddled with the fear of the war that was occurring at the time also contributed to the prevalent terror and panic, as it would now, should such a tragedy be repeated.

Overall, The Last Town on Earth, is a gripping novel about how one town deals with the threat of being inflicted by a deadly virus. The moral struggles the people of the town find themselves dealing with, the guilt, and the terror only adds to the novel. The fear of losing one’s life to something that it can neither fight, nor fend off, was what scared the people of the Commonwealth the most. Eventually, when the flu did reach the town of Commonwealth, the people of the town came to realize that there are some things you can’t prevent, some things that are impossible to hide from. As the father of one of the flu-inflicted victims said, as he nursed him back to health, “I believe now that what’s happened here was simply meant to be, that this is something larger than all of us–larger than each of us individually and larger than all of us collectively. I don’t know why God would see fit to do this, and I don’t see what lessons we’ll draw when it’s passed. We can only press on as best as we can, and I intend to do that,” (page 340). This novel was far more enjoyable than I thought it would be, and I am delighted that I had a chance to read it.